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About One Fat Englishman

The hero of One Fat Englishman, a literary publisher and lapsed Catholic escaped from the pages of Graham Greene to the campus of Budweiser College in provincial Pennsylvania, is philandering, drunken, bigoted, and very very fat, not to mention in a state of continuous spluttering rage against everything, not least his own overgrown self. In America, Roger Micheldene must deal with not so obliging suburban housewives, aspiring Jewish novelists who as good as clean his clock, stray deer, bad cigars, children who beat him at Scrabble (“It was no wonder that people were horrible when they started life as children”), and America itself, while making ever-more desperate and humiliating overtures to Helen, a Scandinavian ice queen. If only Roger would dare to show some real feeling of his own. This comic masterpiece—about the 1950s crashing drunkenly into the consumerist 1960s and a final scion of a disintegrating Old World empire encountering its upstart New World offspring—is one of Kingsley Amis’s greatest and most caustic performances.

About One Fat Englishman

The hero of One Fat Englishman, a literary publisher and lapsed Catholic escaped from the pages of Graham Greene to the campus of Budweiser College in provincial Pennsylvania, is philandering, drunken, bigoted, and very very fat, not to mention in a state of continuous spluttering rage against everything, not least his own overgrown self. In America, Roger Micheldene must deal with not so obliging suburban housewives, aspiring Jewish novelists who as good as clean his clock, stray deer, bad cigars, children who beat him at Scrabble (“It was no wonder that people were horrible when they started life as children”), and America itself, while making ever-more desperate and humiliating overtures to Helen, a Scandinavian ice queen. If only Roger would dare to show some real feeling of his own. This comic masterpiece—about the 1950s crashing drunkenly into the consumerist 1960s and a final scion of a disintegrating Old World empire encountering its upstart New World offspring—is one of Kingsley Amis’s greatest and most caustic performances.

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Praise

“This comic masterpiece about the 1950s crashing drunkenly into the consumerist 1960s, is one of Amis’ greatest and most caustic performances.” –Kirkus Reviews

“Amis’s funniest novel since Lucky Jim.” —Newsweek

“Very funny…splendidly slapstick…and serious too…. A satire of wit and intelligence that class it with the best.” —The Times Literary Supplement

“The book is an underhand attack on the Englishman at large…. Amis gets in a few telling swipes at Americans and nymphomaniacs and gourmets and the people in publishing business and anything you care to mention and manages at the same time to write a beautifully witty novel.” —Vogue

“Whatever happened to Lucky Jim? He got fat. That’s the answer Kingsley Amis gives us ten years and four novels on and many people are going to find it hilariously diverting. Rightly so.” —Birmingham Post

“In the light of Amis’s subsequent literary development, and all the biographical information that has emerged since his death, it seems a much more comprehensible and interesting novel—also much funnier, in its black way, than I remembered…. One Fat Englishman is certainly a much less comfortable read than Lucky Jim, but no longer seems as inferior to it as I once thought.” —David Lodge, The Guardian “[Protagonist] Roger Micheldene is a fat, slothful, lecherous and wrathful English publisher in the United States on as little business as he can get away with. This novel chronicles his attempts to drink as many drinks, eat as many meals and seduce as many women during his short stay as is humanly possible.” —The New York Times Book Review “Mr. Amis is a subtle writer…. He has managed to write a commentary on America without seeming to write a commentary on America.” —The Washington Post “The conversation is corrosive; and the characterizations, wickedly penetrating. Not to be missed.” —Publishers Weekly “Roger Micheldene, the fat Englishman, who is the titular hero of Kingsley Amis’s new novel, is easily the most repulsive figure that the imaginative Amis has invented so far, and that is saying a good deal.” —Chicago Tribune “Like the early Evelyn Waugh, Amis has perfected the cool contemptuous tone so necessary to the comedy of bestiality, an extreme form of caricature that permits no faltering sympathy for its subject. Technically, the novel is virtually without flaw.” —The Washington Post “Kingsley Amis writes of his fat Englishman with a mixture of contempt and sympathy. The sympathy is hard to share.” —The New York Times